Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Later today the Obama Administration will reportedly announce major changes in the U. S. space program that may amount to the effective end of manned space flight after this decade. As a guy who has been trying to mount his own mission to the Moon I’m not yet sure how I feel about this. Maybe it is a great opportunity, but probably not.

The FY2011 federal proposed budget will be published with the following changes:

– NASA’s Constellation program to replace the Space Shuttle will be cancelled and all hardware development will be stopped including Ares 1, Ares 5 and Orion.

– The Moon is no longer the first stop in the exploration program, replaced by the so-called Flexible Path which really does not mean anything: “We are not sure where we are going, whether to the Moon, asteroids, empty space (Lagrangian points) or Phobos, so we will spend years and billions of dollars thinking about it while deferring any real mission development.”

– NASA human spaceflight will concentrate on International Space Station (ISS) flights, using commercially developed hardware (whatever that means: NASA has had zero success in relying on outsourced systems).

– There is no real post-ISS program. Maybe something will happen past 2020 but that is for the next administration to figure out.

Where NASA goes other space agencies will follow (the Europeans, Indians, even the Russians, possibly leaving only the Chinese still headed to the Moon). The Moon is out as a destination, considered by some as too hard and others as too boring. Over the next two years we will see a serious drop-off in interest expressed by various groups (like the Google Lunar X-Prize effort).

This has happened before: back in 1990s everybody was into Mars missions (NASA, other government agencies and private groups). When NASA lost interest in Mars around 2001-03 and turned to Moon other nations followed.

On one hand this pending announcement is terribly disappointing. There is a very high chance that we will see an end to U. S. human spaceflight within the next few years. But it was probably inevitable. NASA is too screwed up to do anything else without a major restructuring and that would require spending too much Presidential capital in this terrible economy.

My Moon mission, of course, is still on.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

It’s the morning after and time for an unjaundiced look at Apple’s just-announced iPad tablet computer thingee. My last post was a series of pre-announcement Tweets from a guy at or near EnGadget and I took some grief from readers for even posting it, but in retrospect I am glad I did because it gives me a lot more to say about the new gizmo.

Were the tweets from a real beta tester? While many readers thought they weren’t, I’m pretty sure they were, primarily based on what many perceived as mistakes. Yes, the price points were off but those things can change hour-by-hour right up to the last minute and I wouldn’t put it past Apple to deliberately give bad pricing to testers to mislead and catch leaks. More importantly, the Twitterer said there would be three price points and there were. Based on the iPhone/iTouch intro model one would only have expected two price points.

Let’s look inside this price differential for a moment and try to channel our inner Steve Jobs. The Twitterer said $599, $699, and $799 while Apple announced $499, $599, and $699 without 3G and $629, $729, and $829 for the same models with 3G. But remember the Twitterer was strictly referring to 3G models, since he said they had 3G. He also mentioned both AT&T and Verizon Wireless, while Apple mentioned only AT&T.

Just because Apple didn’t mention Verizon doesn’t mean they won’t also offer 3G service from Verizon. The word “exclusive” was never used referring to AT&T. They trotted-out that pre-paid plan, but it would be crazy for carriers to not also offer a one-year or two-year subscription plan, too, which would drop the unit price somewhat. Maybe the subscription rates weren’t yet set. More likely the Verizon details were still in some limbo or Apple gave AT&T an exclusive presence at the intro in exchange for some concession we may never know about.

With Steve Jobs the deal isn’t done until it is done so I am sure he’s still trying to take one or both carriers to the cleaners.

Which brings us back to that price, which was $30 higher than predicted by the Twitterer. Remember Apple dropped iPhone prices almost immediately after the units started shipping. I don’t think this pricing is set in stone, either.  Maybe the $30 is padding they’ll drop at the intro to make us feel good.  Parts experts say 3G chips now cost around $7, so including one hardly adds $130 to the price or even $100.

Another point brought up against the Twitterer was the battery life (he said three hours, Apple said 10 hours). Reality in the PC and mobile industries is that a 10 hour battery life really means six hours. You may get 100 percent of the advertised battery life, but I don’t. My little Dell Vostro A90 (more on that in a day or so) is supposed to be good for six hours but the little battery meter always tells me on a full charge that I have 3:25 to go. There’s simply no way that iPad, no matter what the processor, is good for a real 10 hours of continuous use. And remember this is the non-3G version they are touting, while the Twitterer was clearly using 3G.

An iPod Touch with Wifi turned on lasts a lot longer than a comparable iPhone with WiFi turned off. In real life I’m pretty sure a 3G iPad IS a 2-3 hour device. And what’s wrong with that?

Finally, where were the split-view camera and the gimmicky solar charger? According to EnGadget the split-view cam is mentioned in the iPad SDK as “iPad-only” and some iPad apps ask you to take pictures without giving you the capability to do so…. yet. I’m sure the camera is coming. As for the solar charger, who’s to say that won’t come shortly, too?

In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if both features are present when the iPad finally ships in 60 days along with iPhone 4.0 software, which many expected to be part of yesterday’s announcement.

I was disappointed by the lack of iPhone 4.0 because this kind of device really needs true multi-tasking. I’m sure we will see it soon. What I am not at all sure about but wish we’d see soon is support for Adobe’s Flash. What does Steve Jobs have against Adobe, anyway? He used to love Adobe chairman John Warnock. There’s some weird daddy thing going on there with Apple’s rejection of Flash and I am tired of it. This new processor is plenty fast enough to support Flash and HTML 5 is still not ready for prime time.

Correction — Here’s a more informed view of the Flash situation from a friend.  it’s hard to argue with his numbers:

“I did a quickie test with the new YouTube HTML5 beta. On a site that embedded a video (so Flash was used), my browser CPU utilization was 22%, and the Adobe Flash plug-in CPU utilization was 55%. (dual core macbook pro, so total CPU% = 200%).

After the video played, I watched the same video again directly on the YouTube site in HTML5. Adobe Flash plug-in CPU utilization was 4% (what it consumes just sitting on its hiney), and the browser CPU utilization was 17%.

77% vs 21%. that’s why Apple hates Adobe. There certainly may be personalities involved (with Jobs, there is always something personal), but Adobe Flash is just technically awful (this actually may be the crux of any Jobs’ hatred – he hates inelegance, and Adobe Flash is inelegant).

I don’t hate Adobe, and it does bother met that I can’t see Flash on the iPhone or iPad, but Adobe has acted very awfully in this area and doesn’t appear to be doing anything to address it. Google and Apple have the muscle to squeeze them out.”

Now we return you to Bob, already in progress:

The apps were underwhelming to me with the exception of iPhoto, but maybe that requires waiting for iPhone 4, too. Overall the product felt rushed. But knowing Steve a little bit I think he’s seeing this as a two-part intro and there will be another event around the shipping date, supposedly 60 days from now, which he’ll correctly view as yet another marketing opportunity. At that event we’ll see 3G from more than just AT&T, we’ll hear about more data plans including subsidized plans that will drop the price by $200. We’ll see the split-view camera, iPhone 4.0, and maybe even that little solar charger.

As presented yesterday the iPad was cool and I’ll probably buy one, but not right away. Fortunately many people will buy them right away then buy them again when the update equivalent to 3G (4G? HD?) comes along, just as they did with the original 2G iPone and the original 128K Mac.  So I am sure the iPad will be at least a modest success, even in its initial incarnation. But you know what it feels like to me with it’s hype followed by an underwhelming reality? It feels like another Segway, which sure hasn’t changed the way people move on the Earth.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

From a beta tester:

Apple tablet is OLED + back has solar pad for recharging, but (the charger) really doesn’t work quickly. More a gimmick. Verizon+att, wifi yes!

Apple Tablet has thumbpads on each side for mouse gestures, reads fingerprint for security. Up to 5 profiles by fingerprint for family.

Yes, there are 2cameras: one in front and one in back (or it may be one with some double lens) so you record yourself and in front of you.

I can tell u the battery life is great in ebook reading mode but not great when on wifi or playing games. 2-3hrs.

Yes, the apple tablet is running an iphone os flavor with ability to have multiple apps running at same time (ie pandora, browser).

The price will be $599, $699 and $799 depending on size and memory in apple tablet. Also, wireless keyboard + monitor connection for TV.

Also, the apple tablet is really amazing for newspapers. Video conferencing is super stable, but nothing new.

The best part of the apple tablet as beta user has been the built in HDTV tuner and pvr, and the chess game.

Yes, it’s true… I’ve been beta testing the Apple tablet for the past two weeks and it’s amazing!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Tomorrow we’ll finally see Apple’s tablet computer, whatever it is finally called. I’ll write another column then attempting to explain where I think this thing is likely to succeed or fail for Apple. But right now I don’t see much point in speculating about something we’ll know for sure within 24 hours. It’s much more useful, I think, to look instead at the Big Media companies Apple is targeting with this device, why they might be attracted and whether the iPad/iSlate/iWhatever is likely to deliver what they think they need.

It won’t.

I was talking not long ago with editorial folks at an unnamed media company that rhymes with “The New York Times.” There was some possibility of my blogging over there. They were intrigued, but couldn’t fit it into their grand plan, at least not right away. The problem was resources were already allocated and such an endeavor takes months to mount and costs tens of thousands of dollars.

No it doesn’t, and that’s the problem with Big Media.

When I was at PBS we did occasional redesigns and I never knew what they cost because for most of my 11 years there I was just a paid contributor. But toward the end of my tenure I became a producer which means I was finally exposed to budgets and was, to some extent, even responsible for paying some of them. And I was shocked to learn that my final design for a Moveable Type blog over there did, indeed, cost tens of thousands of dollars — many tens of thousands of dollars.

PBS isn’t a company that rhymes with “The New York Times” but it still qualifies as Big Media, so the pricing was more or less confirmed.

Now look at the screen you are reading right now, my WordPress blog at cringely.com. It cost me NOTHING to design. I did it myself in a single night with the help of an experienced and generous friend, Benjamin Higginbotham of Spacevidcast.com. This blog is hosted by Media Temple in Los Angeles and costs me $50 per month, which is a lot compared to most blogs, but then I’m getting more than a million page-views per month. One more Christmas card or IBM column and I might bump up to $100 per month just to get some more resources, but I think I’ve made my point: a good Internet media product doesn’t have to cost a lot of money. This is my living, remember, that’s putting three kids through school. What are my gross margins — 10,000 percent?

While those are my gross margins they aren’t the gross margins at PBS or at a company that rhymes with “The New York Times.” Those outfits have overhead I don’t. They have legacy relationships and obligations I can’t even imagine. They can’t just go from there to here in an instant even if they wanted to.

Which brings us back to the iSomething to be introduced tomorrow. No matter how great it is, it can’t support the legacy infrastructure of Big Media, which includes mid-town office buildings and business lunches (hence my picture of New York’s 21 Club, if you hadn’t already figured that out).

Big Media wants revenue approaching what they could charge if a web site was a printed magazine. Remember the original lure of the Internet for publishers was the idea that there would be more profit without the expenses of printing and distribution. But it didn’t work out that way because Internet users won’t generally pay for content.

But Apple has the mojo. Steve Jobs has been firm from the start that content should be paid for and his generally is, except of course for my podcast on iTunes. Big Media likes the way Steve thinks.  And so they can with one breath condemn him for killing the music album, yet in a second breath they can see him as the savior of magazines, newspapers, and good-but-thinly-watched TV series.

And Apple CAN be that savior, but only after a rationalization and severe downsizing of Big Media overhead, which I am not at all sure Big Media is really ready to do.

Based on the rumors I’ve heard so far I’m guessing the new Apple product will be — like the Apple TV — a hobby, a critical success but a business failure, though one with enough potential that Apple will give it a few years to succeed. It’s in giving those few years where Apple really can save Big Media, which will undoubtedly by then be not so big.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Near the eve of Apple’s tablet announcement, I’d like to turn my 2010 predictive eye again to the mobile space where, as my title suggests, there are only three software players that matter — Apple, Google, and RIM (Blackberry).

But wait a minute, isn’t Nokia the big Kahuna in this space and aren’t they right now suing the heck out of Apple? Yes, but that’s an act of desperation, a stalling tactic intended just to slow Apple down or, possibly, send some useful license revenue from Cupertino to Finland. It doesn’t change the inevitable.

So-called “feature phones” are going away, to be replaced within two product cycles (three years, tops) entirely by smart phones driven by mobile app stores and the need for carriers to generate additional revenue. It’s not like you’ll even be able to find a feature phone to buy.

The smart phone marketplace will consolidate around three operating systems — Android, Blackberry, and OS X. Though there will be some ups and down in the market and the complete transition will take longer to complete than my usual 12-month timeline, Symbian, Windows Phone, and every other smart phone OS that isn’t from Apple, Google, or RIM, are likely to die or be reduced to insignificance.

None of these platforms expect to die, but that’s the way it is with these things. You don’t expect to lose until you’ve lost, generally.

On some level Nokia even thinks it still has a chance to win the war, but it doesn’t.

Nokia has faith in its very popular cross-platform application development environment, Qt, which it acquired in 2008 with the $153 million acquisition of Norwegian company Trolltech, father of Qt. Nokia sees Qt as its secret sauce — a potent weapon against Apple.

Qt, like any of a number of 4GLs can write once and deploy a lot of places. Where Qt is different from the other 4GLs (in the mind of Nokia at least) is that it manages to do what it does without killing app performance, probably because Qt began as a mobile product and mobile apps have to be lean and fast.

So Qt is growing up at just the time applications and OSes are growing down, thanks to OS X and the iPhone. Qt has made notable progress supporting 3D apps and a huge variety of processors, chipsets, and GPUs. They showed at CES the same apps running from the same source on a ton of different hardware platforms from handsets to desktops to set top boxes. And now Nokia has reportedly done the unthinkable, which is to rewrite Maemo, its Linux, in Qt.

Meanwhile, Apple has been rolling forward with its PA Semi strategy, the first fruit of which we’ll apparently see announced next week. I sense that Apple is headed toward a family of devices from handhelds to servers all linked to a cloud and ostensibly running the same OS. Apple is mining the ARM ecosystem for this move in addition to its own PA Semi extensions.

Nokia thinks that, through either Qt or various legal moves (or both), it can slow Apple’s mobile juggernaut. They won’t, and here’s why.

Apple hires the meanest lawyers it can find, paying extra bucks for that “kick them for good measure” attitude. I know a company that had long legal battles with both Microsoft and Apple and they said Apple’s legal team was far worse than Microsoft’s, hands down. So while Nokia’s appeal to the World Trade Organization (WTO) to punish Apple, is an act of desperation, Apple’s similar response is just the way they do these things.

This legal situation is going to get uglier and uglier but in the end it will be settled with patent cross-licensing, no monetary damages or license fees, and Nokia feeling relieved to get out of the negotiating room alive.

This will happen, I believe, because Apple doesn’t really give a damn about Qt or Nokia. They care much more about Google and Microsoft.

Nokia is going to fail in using Qt and Symbian to compete with Android or iPhone application frameworks because Nokia just doesn’t understand software. Nokia is a hardware company that does software and hardware companies aren’t fighting this new war, they just build the weapons.

Remember Apple is a software company that sells its products in an expensive hardware box.

Ultimately (more than 12 months from now) there will be a shakeout and Nokia will drop Symbian and even Maemo in favor of Google’s Android and Nokia custom apps, UI, and hardware.

Meanwhile Microsoft will cut its rumored (and incredibly expensive) iPhone search deal with Apple, then it will introduce Windows Phone 7, which will fail to gain market traction for Redmond. Microsoft will ultimately align with Apple to avoid the embarrassment of working with Google, but this alignment will be solely for mobile.

That is unless Microsoft buys RIM and then doesn’t screw it up.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

For the past 2-3 years I have been a pain to IBM, correctly pointing-out a number of policies and actions by the computer giant that have shown a pattern of disrespect to employees and customers alike. I can’t argue with IBM’s financial performance but I can argue that this performance has come at a cost that is too high for the people of IBM and even for IBM customers, which is why my 2010 prediction for Big Blue is Customers in Revolt.

Top management at IBM has nearly always come from the sales side of the business and it is that sales side that has been outdoing itself quarter after quarter helping IBM earnings to grow even in a recession. It doesn’t hurt, of course, that lots of IBM revenue comes from its international operations and has benefited from a weak dollar. But a fair amount of this success — at least on the services side — comes from very aggressively bidding for work.

But what happens if your bid is too low to actually make money for the company? At IBM, ironically, that’s not a problem for the sales people. It is a problem for the people charged with actually performing the services.

According to IBM customers I have spoken to, the company seems unable to create a solution and put a price to it that anyone would accept so the sales organization appears to sell almost anything at whatever price they can get. They collect their commission and move on to the next deal, leaving behind a mess for the service organization to deal with.

Dealing in this case means cutting costs to the point where the contract is profitable even if not truly fulfilled. Because there is such a big disconnect between the price of the contract and the cost needed to deliver it, crazy things are done, starting with offshoring on a massive scale.

While offshoring is not intrinsically bad, it leaves almost nobody working in the data centers, which are necessarily back in the U.S. When the server folks are thousands of miles from the equipment, how does the equipment get installed? Who does the hands-on work? If a machine breaks, how long does it take to get someone there to fix it?  IBM customers are learning the rueful answers to these questions.

IBM is also building several new “global delivery centers.” One of these is in Dubuque, Iowa. Why Dubuque? It is my understanding that IBM hopes to reduce its labor costs and one way to do this is by choosing remote locations like Dubuque with few locals who could qualify to be IBM techs or engineers. Experienced IBMers being downsized in places like New York won’t move to Dubuque, so they can be replaced with cheaper (and younger) labor. Dubuque’s lack of native talent means IBM can staff the centers with mostly foreign H1-B personnel, again so they can pay them less and have no long-term benefits exposure.

I find it difficult to see how customers benefit from these global delivery centers.

But wait, there’s more! The offshoring, the spin off of network work to AT&T, the “global centers,” the new internal processes are not much compared to the latest IBM ploy I’ve heard about — the use of used equipment. To save money on its outsourcing contracts, I have been told that IBM is refurbishing old equipment and substituting it for new. The customer pays a service/lease rate for new, but in the IBM data center what’s actually in the rack is used hardware. Since IBM holds the title and lease and customers never visit the data centers anyway, the customers don’t know.

Only I guess now they do know.

If I was an IBM customer leasing hardware that was represented as new I’d darned well want to verify that’s the case. Send somebody to the data center and check serial numbers. What can it hurt? You might save some money on the contract or score some new equipment or both. It’s worth a shot.

Corporate America will tolerate a lot of this kind of behavior, but there are limits, especially when deadlines are consistently missed and deliverables fail to perform as promised. That’s why I predict troubles for IBM in 2010 with customer satisfaction.

Take a look at that contract, Mr. or Ms. CFO (not the CIO — he or she sometimes can’t be trusted in these things), verify the number of machines and bodies that are supposed to be involved. If IBM is using only half the promised labor or half the promised hardware (or both) then raise some Hell.

Remember, it’s your money.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

More 2010 predictions, this time for Google, which is reeling right now from cyber attacks in China and customer attacks in the U. S. where the Nexus One is getting an underwhelming response from early adopters.

Here’s word from a friend of mine — a smart phone whore — who had a Nexus One for a month and didn’t tell me until this morning. Still, his reactions are informed and represent a month of experience. “I’m not too impressed with it as a phone, ” says my friend. “It’s basically a wash. Google is screw’n it big time with the horrible plans they are dishing it out on t-Mobile and the price is ridiculous. To beat all, it’s radio is horrible, so bad that I literally gave it back and returned to a clunky G1. There is no decent smart phone out right now except the Moto Cliq unless you are lucky enough to have good AT&T coverage with an iPhone, which I don’t.”

Early Nexus One users hate the phone, hate the plans, hate the network, hate the price, but what they hate most of all is Google’s lack of customer service. Shouldn’t Google have seen this coming? Of course, but the company operates in a bubble that market realities often can’t penetrate. Eventually Google will be good at this stuff, but how long will that take? Too long?

What amazes me is the bad radio given that this is an HTC product and HTC is a very good mobile phone manufacturer. Taking a guess about what’s happening there I predict that HTC warned Google about the radio problem but there were so many IQ points jetting around the conference room at Google that nobody bothered to actually listen they were so much in love with each other. Sometimes just being smarter is not enough. In fact just being smarter is never enough, even at chess – a lesson Google will have to learn the hard way, I suppose.

Now to China where hackers or spies or who-knows-who have been attacking Google and the search giant is threatening to take its ball and go home, leaving completely the Chinese market. What sense does this make? It makes no sense to me. Google is going to have zero impact on China — zero — by abandoning that market, which Microsoft and Yahoo will gladly fill. so threatening to walk away is simply stupid.

Of course Google couches all this in terms of rejecting Chinese government censorship, which is a good thing, but we’re still left with either posturing that isn’t real or stupid-ass behavior that is real but shows this isn’t likely to be the Google Decade after all.

Here’s a better approach for Google to take. Stand in front of a bank of cameras and microphones my very impressive friend Tiffany Montague (Google’s link with NASA, keeper of the Google G-V parking spaces at Moffett Field, and internal space expert) to have her explain how Google is going to launch a satellite Internet service similar to one I described in a recent column, specifically to bring freedom of information (and advertising) to totalitarian regimes everywhere.

The technology exists, Google could finance it, and China couldn’t stop it.

This assumes, of course, that Google has some guts, which I doubt.

Otherwise, 2010 looks like a good year for Google mainly because Internet advertising will recover somewhat and Google should make some progress in phones, browsers, operating systems, apps, and the cloud in general. In those areas they are still ahead of the curve and ahead of the curve is a great place to be.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Back to my 2010 predictions, this time mainly about Apple, the PC company that fared best in 2009 and is likely to fare best in 2010, too. Though I also wonder at what point we take Apple’s hint and stop thinking of them so much as a computer company?

Over the past years Apple has brought out successively better and ever more solid versions of OS X. They’ve completed a transition from PowerPC to Intel processors that could have killed a lesser company. They’ve built a dominant line of professional apps and a competitive line of productivity apps, pricing them reasonably compared to Microsoft. They re-invented the media player and the smart phone. They revolutionized the record business. And having once vilified the very idea of Apple stores, they changed their minds and showed the world how stores ought to be run. The company is absolutely at the top of its game despite a CEO who was absent for months near death. How do you top that?

In 2010 you do so by entering new markets and turning on old friends, sometimes simultaneously. That’s likely to be the case with the coming iSlate tablet, or whatever it will be called, which definitely won’t be running exclusively on AT&T. You can see that from AT&T’s sudden embrace of Android, which never would have happened if Steve Jobs hadn’t first made a preemptive move of his own for the iSlate, probably to Verizon.  The Apple/AT&T marriage is now one of convenience only.

The iSlate (or whatever) will be Steve’s idea of a new category of computing, or at least that’s the way he’ll spin it. Not an ebook reader, not a tablet computer, not a pen computer, not a handheld, not a smart phone, the iSlate will be something else and I’d say that something will depend on: a) the content deals Apple can announce, and; b) whatever Steve decides to claim for the product, whether actually true or not.

So expect lots of print deals for newspapers, magazines, and books. Expect, too, audio and video deals for the iSlate. Expect some major UI gimmick too, because that’s always at the heart of one of these advances. “It isn’t an MP3 player! It’s an AAC player with this tuning wheel thingee!! ” See what I mean?

Apple will under-promise and over-deliver for the iSlate. And if for some reason they don’t, then they’ll just declare it to be a hobby, like the AppleTV.

Apple as a content company will move into subscription music based on its recent Lala Media acquisition, but don’t think this embracing of streaming means Apple will be abandoning downloads, no sirree. Remember that while Hulu, for example, has been making a lot of news delivering streamed TV and movies, Apple has been making a lot of profit downloading both for sale and rental.

The downloading-streaming-downloading pendulum is about to turn direction, I think, with the advent of true 1080p video on the net. Years ago no network was fast enough for high fidelity streaming audio, much less streaming video, so everything was downloaded. Then networks got faster and people streamed. Then video came along (and Bit Torrent) and people downloaded again. That’s when iTunes rose to power for those of us who actually pay our bills. Then YouTube made streaming again popular. But now 1080p files are just so darned big that downloading is, again, where it’s at.

So what does that say about Apple’s vaunted rejection of Blu-Ray disks? I’ve maintained in the past that Apple refused to offer Blu-Ray as part of its agenda to take control of downloadable HD video standards. and I think I was right. But here’s news: Apple’s new line of iMacs were supposed to ship with Blu-Ray drives, but didn’t. What gives with that? Maybe it was a technical glitch, maybe a last minute pricing problem, maybe Steve didn’t get enough blood or flesh from some corporate partner (Sony). But I think it means that the fight over HD was won by Apple to the extent that they feel they can start listening again to their professional customers from the video industry who have been screaming for Blu-Ray.

So look for Blu-Ray drives to start appearing, shortly, in Apple computers along with Blu-Ray support in all of Apple’s professional applications. Look also for Apple to offer some higher level of HD download, probably with expanded device portability courtesy of Disney’s new KeyChest technology, which I am sure came from Apple.

And then there’s the iPhone. The iSlate will be a bigger iPhone, but in 2010 we’ll surely see at least two next-gen iPhones, too — a smaller form factor in the Nano tradition and a 1 GHz processor on something like the current model. Apple will remain atop the smart phone market, where Android may eventually threaten, but not yet.  As we see from the first Nexus One reviews, Google has a lot to learn.

More about Google and the Nexus One tomorrow, as well as an interesting theory about Apple and Nokia.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

We interrupt this 2010 predictions column to predict trouble ahead, first for mobile banking apps, second for ISPs who stupidly piss-off my readers, and finally for buyers like me of Dell Vostro A90 netbooks. I further predict we’ll return with more prediction columns within hours.

First the mobile app problem. My friend Stephen Schaubach just noticed something about mobile banking apps that is very scary. He wrote about it tonight on Slashdot, but since he’s my friend (Stephen introduced me to my wife — I think that qualifies him as a friend, don’t you?) I feel okay about the duplication.  As for that introduction many years ago, Stephen was just showing her off, not realizing that I would see in her great potential as the mother of difficult children.

“While checking out Google’s Android app store I searched for a banking app to use with my bank, ” wrote Stephen. “I was surprised to see three mobile apps listed and none of them released from the bank itself. I cannot say what any of these apps are doing behind the scenes for sure but the mobile app could certainly swipe your credentials and connect you to the bank at the same time a lot more convincingly than any phishing site could. Is this the beginning of mobile app phishing? It’s hard to believe nobody at the app store end is checking to see if the app has been legitimately released/signed from the actual bank it’s representing. It makes me wonder what other apps are out there mining people’s personal data, phishing, etc. and what can be done about this potential risk to safeguard the general public? Has anyone else run into similar situations? Anti-phishing software like Nokia’s Free Anti-Phishing app or mobile Safari’s similar feature wouldn’t protect the mobile user from an application doing something via code behind the scenes. Perhaps only a code walk-through or a legit digital certificate would remedy this situation. Any thoughts?”

I think this is potentially a huge problem that snuck up under our noses. And there’s more of it than just at banks. On my iPhone, for example, I have apps for Netflix and Red Box video rentals, neither of which was produced by those companies and both now know my account numbers and passwords.

Yes. there are outfits like Mint.com that ask for all our account numbers and passwords, but Mint at least has a lot on the line as now a part of Intuit. With many mobile app developers being one-man outfits, it’s easy for a bad guy to get away with murder by offering a service that appears to be a heck of a deal but is really being used for identity theft.

I just wrote a paragraph here explaining how I would go about running such a scam then realized that was just encouraging crime. Needless to say there are a number of common user habits that can be leveraged quite easily to obtain the most private user information. And what can be done probably is being done right now.

Remember that while your bank may cover financial losses that are their fault, your signing-up for a bogus third party mobile banking app counts as your fault and the bank probably owes you nothing.

Second complaint: Time-Warner Cable doesn’t seem to care about helping its customers fight crime. Here’s the story from reader Andy Barr back in my old stomping grounds of Holmes County, Ohio:

“My parents house was robbed and their computer stolen. I had installed www.logmein.com on the computer so when it showed up on the internet 18 hours later I was able to get the IP address and give it to the police, which in turn asked Time-Warner cable, the ISP for that IP address, for an address for the thief. Time-Warner has a web page specifically about how to get this information.

“It seems straight forward. However the police are computer illiterate. They had no idea what an IP address was but I explained it to them. The police submitted a request and then 10 days later Time Warner came back saying they don’t have a computer with that IP address. It seems the person who submitted the paperwork listed the wrong IP address.

“So they resubmitted again, waited two more weeks and this time Time-Warner said they needed a time and date when the computer was on the internet with the given IP address. I had told the police about the above web page but in spite of this they evidently did not put any the time or date on the subpoena.

This is Bob again. We’ll get back to Andy’s story in a moment but my experience with cable modems and cable ISPs is that while their IP addresses are technically dynamic — that is subject to change at every login — in practice they hardly ever are changed.  Most cable Internet users have exactly the same IP address for years. Just to be sure I ran this information past another friend who was one of the architects of Time-Warner’s Roadrunner system and he confirmed that IP addresses are essentially permanent. So this particular dodge from Time-Warner is nonsense.

Back to Andy: “They resubmitted again and waited another three weeks. This time Time-Warner came back saying they now need a search warrant. The police submit a search warrant and now three months since the IP address was given to the police they still have no information from the cable company.

“After a few weeks of waiting, I used logmein’s pro version to connect to the computer and downloaded all my parents’ documents and pictures. I found a picture of the likely thief in front of the computer. I also have the person’s name and Myspace page, though the police don’t seem interested in tracking down the person using that information. ”

I feel Andy’s pain, don’t you? Time-Warner Cable appears not to want to be bothered. In fact they are probably annoyed at the persistence and technical capability of Andy. If anyone from Time-Warner Cable is reading this or if you are a Time-Warner Cable customer who doesn’t want to have a similar experience, now would be a great time to speak up.

Third complaint: My son Fallon’s Vostro A90 netbook, which I wrote about right after Christmas,  was finally repaired successfully by Dell but now the Vostro thinks it is an Inspiron 10V.

It took Dell a few days to notice my column about Fallon’s A90 that wouldn’t charge and my many attempts to get it fixed. I eventually got a call from a very nice guy in Dell PR who became my official contact, whatever that means. It sure didn’t mean better customer service. I got a call from Dell support saying that had received the Vostro for a second motherboard replacement and I’d be getting an update from them just as soon as they heard from the repair depot, probably within minutes or hours. Five days later, still having heard nothing more from Dell support, the little A90 reappeared on my doorstep.

This time the netbook appears to have been repaired successfully. I can tell work was done because the SSD this time was reinstalled with the proper two screws instead of just one screw last time. I could tell work was done because the case, which hadn’t been scratched before, now had lots of little scratches on it. Or maybe the scratches came because Dell didn’t use the padded foam envelope they’d asked me to use to ship the system to them. It was there, crumpled in the bottom of the box, but they didn’t bother to use it. Not using it meant the A90 was too small for the foam padding and knocked around inside the shipping box. But I knew most obviously that work had been done when I booted the A90 and it told me as the BIOS loaded that it was now an Inspiron 10V.

Maybe this is no big deal. Maybe I should be glad that my $200 netbook now has the motherboard of a $350 netbook. But frankly I found it annoying. The last time I got a shuffle like this was when a Chevy 350 engine appeared inside my new 1976 Oldsmobile. GM paid customers millions to cover that executive decision.

Fallon also had a couple apps (this is Linux remember) that he’d compiled specifically for the Vostro and its A04 BIOS. Well the Inspiron BIOS is A05 and the apps no longer work right, so I guess Fallon will be recompiling again, which at age three is a non-trivial event.

This is just slipshod support. Maybe they’ve already discontinued the A90 and are out of motherboards. I don’t care. Dell is supposedly committed to supporting my machine and they didn’t do it. Worse still, when I reported this back to my “official contact, ” he quoted Customer Support as saying that they had sent me an e-mail that I never got.

If they are lying to him and lying to me, then they are lying to you, too. Worse still, if they’ll play this fast and loose with a tech blogger with 300,000 readers, then Dell simply doesn’t give a damn about any of us.

I’ll be waiting for your call, Michael.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

This is my second predictions column for 2010 with more to come. This column is about homeland security, which is something our government isn’t very good at and I predict won’t get any better at this year because of a systemic inability to do correctly even the most basic things to protect our society, our privacy, and our way of life.

President Obama this week proposed some changes in how homeland security is managed following that Christmas Eve attempt to explode an airliner as it was landing in Detroit. These changes are minimal but I doubt they’ll even be implemented because this is a system that inevitably reverts to little fiefdoms run by idiots.

Can you tell I’m pissed-off?

I saw this coming. Here’s something I wrote in this space on September 13th, 2001, two days after the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks:

“…. The most important reaction to terrorism that a free society can show is to not give in to it. But not giving in takes many forms, and I fear that some of the official reactions to the events of this week will take the form of effectively giving in if they also mean that we give up our freedom. “To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” wrote Mark Twain. In the current, context this means that the organizations charged with reacting to this catastrophe will do so by doing what they have always done, only more of it. Congress, which controls the budget and passes laws, will want to pass laws and to allocate more money, lots of money, forgetting completely about any campaign promises. The military, which is the nation’s enforcer, will want to use force, if only they can find a foe. The intelligence community, which gathers information, will want to be even more energetic in that gathering, no matter what the cost to the privacy of the millions of us who aren’t thinking of terrorist acts. And agencies like the Federal Aviation Administration, which regulate, will want to create more stringent regulations. Now here is an important point to be remembered: All these parties will want to do these things whether they are warranted or useful or not…. ”

That was more than eight years ago, yet not much has changed since then except the names of the agencies and the length of the queues. The current crisis is one that should have been foreseen, officials from the President on down admit, and the fact that it wasn’t worse comes down to terrorist incompetence, citizen bravery, and nothing else. The government had all along the information to stop this guy but they didn’t do it.

Instead of just complaining, let’s take a look at the issue from another angle. Contrast these three situations: 1) you are sitting in a hotel bar in Mongolia and want to use your Visa card to buy a round of drinks for your friends, and; 2) your Mom is at the check-out counter at a Sears store when the clerk asks her if she wants to apply for a Sears credit card and save 10 percent on her order, and 3) a possible terrorist with a dubious travel record and suspected al-Qaeda connections is standing in line at a European airport waiting to board a flight to the U.S. that leaves in an hour. What happens in each of these cases?

In Mongolia the bartender takes your card and authorizes it in seconds across a 12,000-mile round-trip. At the Sears store the transaction is not only authorized in less than a minute, but a new account is created and both your Mom’s identity and her creditworthiness are established and calculated on the spot, along with her discount. Meanwhile the airline, airport, local security, European police, Interpol, Transportation Security Administration, Department of Homeland Security, Customs Service, FBI, CIA, and NSA can’t between them figure out in an hour whether this guy standing in line in Holland should be allowed on the plane or not.

How is it that we can run our credit card operations so well and our national security so poorly?

I’ll answer that in a moment but first another anecdote from my files.

I wrote a column awhile back in which I explained that while the U. S. Government has little to no idea how many illegal aliens there are in America, the big credit reporting agencies know exactly how many:

“… The credit reporting agencies have a handle on total numbers and have a lot of information on specific individuals. So members of the gray economy are, for the most part, not invisible at all, just difficult to identify as individuals. But thanks to data mining down at the credit bureau, it is getting harder and harder to hide. A lot of this sleuthing comes down to a surprising artifact, the Social Security number. One would think that surprising for an economic class of people best known for not having Social Security numbers. Ah, but they do have Social Security numbers, just not their own. You need a Social Security number to sign up for utility services, for example. No Social Security number, no electricity, gas, phone, or satellite TV. So what’s a poor alien to do? They go down to some local hangout and buy a Social Security number to give to the utility. This has to be a legitimate number or it won’t fly with utility computer systems, but does it have to be the customer’s own number? Good question. Here’s where we have an interesting business ethics issue. Say you are the electric company and someone tries to set up service using a Social Security number that already exists in your database and is clearly borrowed, bought, or stolen. What do you do? Most utilities go ahead and set up the account, because to them what counts is whether the new customer will actually pay that bill and it turns out that people operating on such borrowed numbers are more reliable bill payers than the rest of us. They can’t afford to get in trouble with the electric company because that would draw attention to them. So there is a tacit agreement between the parties that a Social Security number must be provided because that’s the rule, but if it happens to be someone else’s Social Security number, well that’s okay. The funny thing about this is the impact it has to have on the person who was originally assigned that Social Security number by the U. S. government. Rather than hurt their credit it actually helps because there is so much evidence that they are good at paying their bills! Of course the credit bureau notices something and that’s why they are so able to estimate numbers in the first place. They know what Social Security numbers are being overused and can probably even trace the genealogy of that number as it makes its way across the country. Here’s an amazing fact: some individual Social Security numbers are in use right now by up to 3,000 people and it isn’t at all unusual for a borrowed number to be used by 200-1,000 people at the same time… ”

Okay, that’s interesting and weird, but let me tell you about the phone call I got later about it from the U. S. Department of Homeland Security.

“The credit bureaus can really do that? ” Mr. Homeland Security asked. “Do they really have that kind of data? Who can tell us more about this? ”

I am not making this up.

That was in 2007 — six years after 9/11 and the people who had already spent billions of dollars making us safer by gathering information had no idea at all what kind of information was already being gathered.

I don’t know what happened after that but I can make a good guess. My guess is that the folks at Homeland Security if they actually bothered to follow-up on the contacts I gave them probably decided they needed to spend more billions and build a similar information system for their own use — yet another fiefdom — and that system will be operational sometime this decade.

I have a better idea. Why not outsource the whole screening process to the credit agencies? Don’t build a new system, just throw a few extra fields in the existing records — fields like “terrorist associations” or “U. S. citizen” — fields that can be populated only by that long list of agencies I mentioned up the page. If there are security or privacy concerns then encrypt these new fields and limit access.

Of course credit agencies make mistakes, too. But it is a generally functional system, which is more than I can say for the way we’ve been running Homeland Security so far.

Sadly I can predict, too, that what I suggest here will never happen.